By jonbilous @ Adobe Stock
In The New York Sun, Novi Zhukovsky explains the tactics that could be used to cripple the woke Ivy League universities, particularly Columbia. She writes:
Citing Trump’s campaign pledge to push for significant reforms to America’s higher education institutions, the Stand Columbia Society — which is a self-declared non-partisan organization dedicated to restoring the New York City Ivy’s “excellence” — identifies a handful of ways in which the federal government could pull financial support from Columbia, or any other university.
The most likely governmental action, the group says, would be for the government to pump the brakes on issuing new research grants to the university, a move that would require no justification at all. The government could also squeeze the enrollment of international students — a majority of whom pay full tuition without aid — by curbing issuance of student visas. Columbia boasts upwards of 13,800 international students. Losing out on the cohort could cost them up to $800 million in tuition money.
Neither one of these scenarios requires the administration to take legal action. Trump could simply direct governmental agencies to pause new grants or curtail student visas. Moreover, the government could, additionally, push to withhold all federal funding should it determine that a university had violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
That statute bars recipients of federal funding from discriminating based on race, color, or national origin. It was later clarified in 2004 by the then-assistant secretary for the Department of Education, Kenneth Marcus, that Title VI also protected the rights of ethnic groups that shared a religious faith, such as Jews.
Given the explosion of antisemitism that erupted on college campuses in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack, and the well-documented evidence that university administrations failed to protect Jewish students from harassment, intimidation, and assault, it doesn’t appear it would take much to make the case that Columbia, and a whole host of other universities, violated Title VI.
Columbia, for its part, faces at least three Title VI lawsuits over campus antisemitism. Harvard’s grappling with two. University of California Los Angeles, University of Pennsylvania, New York University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology are also on the list.
Another option for the Trump administration would be to rally behind a House proposal to increase excise taxes on university endowments’ financial gains to 20 percent. That would significantly haircut the Columbia Endowment’s $1.5 billion gross investment return of the past year. It would be even worse for Harvard’s endowment — the largest of any university in the country — which grew this year by $2.5 billion. If Vice President-elect Vance has his way, that tax could even come out to 35 percent.
In a less likely scenario, Stand Columbia judges the government could cut off Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements to university-affiliated hospitals, which case law suggests also falls under the protections of Title VI. Thus, Columbia and any other university medical center could lose out on revenue from patients enrolled in government-supported health insurance programs.
Trump, for his part, has been vocal in his disapproval of the state of higher education, particularly in light of the anti-Israel protests that exploded on college campuses following Hamas’s attack on October 7. During his campaign, Trump promised to ax federal support and accreditation for universities that fail to put an end to “anti semitic propaganda” and deport international students that are involved in violent anti-Israel campus protests. Most recently, he’s pledged to dismantle the Department of Education altogether.
Read more here.
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